DC Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy - YLTF Member Testifies at DC Council Hearing

Donnell Kie, a junior at Ballou Senior High School and member of DC Campaign's Youth Leadership Task Force, testified at a hearing before the City Council, Committee of the Whole, on Saturday, October 13, 2007. The hearing was convened by City Council Chairman Vincent Gray at the John A. Wilson Building to hear the concerns of youth.

Teens are experts on their own lives. They know firsthand

how processes work for them and how they access services.

Three members of the YLTF who attended the hearing, including Donnell Kie, also spoke with Mayor Fenty after the hearing.

DC Campaign provides opportunities and cultivates skills required to enable teens to speak for themselves about issues of importance to them. Through education, advocacy regarding practices, regulations, and policies that affect teens, and testimony at public hearings, DC Campaign ensures that all teens will have the fundamentals required for helping to make their lives better and be healthy, productive adults.

"Good Morning Chairman Gray and other city council members. Thank you for the opportunity to speak today. My name is Donnell Kie, I am 16 years old, a junior at Ballou Senior High School and a third-year member of the Youth Leadership Task Force at DC Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy.

There are many situations at my school that I could tell you about but here is one that is important to me. There are NOT enough counselors to go around. Let me explain: Ballou has many students. I don’t know how many, maybe a couple of thousands. But they only have one counselor for each grade level. I am in the 11th grade and it is about 300 of us.

And I plan on going to college when I graduate but I don't know exactly where I want to go yet. That’s why I need to talk to a guidance counselor who can give me information and help me to decide. But with only one counselor for about 300 11th graders, it is hard for me to get a chance to see her. Sometimes she is busy with other students, or teachers and sometimes parents.

You are probably going to ask me, “Why don’t you go to the library?” Well, my neighborhood library is a little kiosk on Alabama Avenue and Stanton Road southeast. It doesn't have a lot of college catalogs and most of the time, the computers don’t work. So what can I do?

If you are a student, you should be able to get what you need. And it shouldn’t matter what part of the city you live in. All this talk about us being the city’s future leaders won’t come true if we don’t get what we need now. Thank you very much.”